L'ATELIER Parfum Exclusive Interview: Emotion is the Key to Buy Fragrances

"Through our fragrances, we want consumers to enter an amazing journey of the senses and experience all of life's most beautiful emotions."

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Founded in 2020, L'ATELIER Parfum is a young French fragrance brand based in Paris. The brand is called “the creator of emotions”. Each fragrance is dedicated to exploring the infinite emotional power of the user.

"There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes." Each consumer has different preferences and perceptions of perfume. How does L'ATELIER Parfum connect with global consumers through emotions? Recently, CHAILEEDO interviewed Masha and Mikolaj, the two founders of L'ATELIER Parfum, to discuss their understanding of emotional perfumes and their views on the fragrance market from in-depth communication.

Sales of 10 million euros

It is understood that the first product of the L'ATELIER Parfum was released in mid-2021 and was well received by the market as soon as it was sold. "It was a love story," Mikolaj said of the reason the two of them created the brand.

"It wasn't a love affair between the two of us." Mikolaj laughed, "Masha and I have been friends for many years and have been working together in the cosmetics industry for many years, and by love, we mean a love and passion for perfume."

"Through our fragrances, we want consumers to enter an amazing journey of the senses and experience all of life's most beautiful emotions." Masha further stated. However, the process of creating the brand did not go so smoothly. As we all know, 2020 was in the early stages of COVID-19's development, and almost the entire upstream and downstream ends of the supply chain were hit hard, with varying degrees of shortages in factory production capacity.

Fortunately, Mikolaj and Masha were well surrounded by experienced partners from the supply chain to the factories. During the interview, Masha shared a short story: "Special thanks to our subcontractor Stiff for supporting us in production and logistics during those tough times. After learning about our concept, he also invested in our brand."

According to Marsha, during the epidemic, the L'ATELIER Parfum brand had a positive service rating of nearly 100 percent service rate, "which is very amazing, especially for a young brand." Thanks to a better consumer reputation, the L'ATELIER Parfum achieved sales (equivalent to retail) of 10 million euros during the 2022-2023 fiscal year (April 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023).

(Credit: two founders of L'ATELIER Parfum)

A good storyteller is the key to success

So, how did L'ATELIER Parfum achieve such a remarkable market performance?

Mikolaj stated that although the language spoken in each country is different, everyone is able to read emotions and the emotion when smelling a perfume is something that can resonate with consumers around the world across languages. Masha also said that emotion is an important factor for consumers when buying perfume. "People's emotions are all connected, so I think it's very easy to communicate emotionally. So we are not crafting perfumes, we are crafting emotions. After the consumer understands our brand story, our fragrances create a very strong connection with the consumer."

"Communicating our brand story to the consumer is also key to success." He shared, "BAs who sell our products also share the emotions they personally feel when using the fragrance. So, we don't need BAs to mechanically recite our brand story, just have them try the fragrance and say how the fragrance inspired them."

We understand that several world-class master perfumers are currently working with the L'ATELIER Parfum brand and designing fragrances. "The perfumers we work with are very much in tune with the brand's philosophy, which is why they worked with us at the very beginning of our brand," Mikolaj said. The master perfumers who have worked with L'ATELIER Parfum include ALEXIS DADIER, who has designed fragrances for Jo Malone and Valentino, and SERGE DE OLIVEIRA, who has worked for Chloé, Atl. Oblique and Lalique.

When talking about L'ATELIER Parfum fragrances, Mikolaj also shared his personal favorite fragrance series - Secret of Garden. He said the fragrances in the series come in seven colors, corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow. When users smell the fragrances of the collection, L'ATELIER Parfum hopes to transport them to the scene of walking through a fragrant garden. The seven fragrances also represent seven emotions such as passion, confidence and pleasure.

(Credit: one of fragrance series of L'Atelier Parfum)

In complete respect for nature, L'Atelier Parfum selects premium natural ingredients from France and around the world. For this reason, the brand chose to work with the Robertet family house in Grasse, an institution with over 170 years of excellence and unique expertise. Based on this philosophy, L'Atelier Parfum's fragrances are formulated with up to 95% natural ingredients, and Masha believes that the younger generation of consumers is particularly interested in clean beauty and zero cruelty, which is very much in line with the brand's founder's philosophy, "L'Atelier Parfum's fragrances do not add any synthetic dyes, endocrine disruptors, irritants or pollutants."

Mikolaj told CHAILEEDO that L'Atelier Parfum fragrances are currently available in over 400 physical stores in more than 25 markets, and have been entered in such prestigious international distributions as Bloomingdale's, a leading U.S. department store, Harvey Nichols, a British premium department store, LVMH's high-end beauty retailer Sephora and many others.

In Hong Kong Sephora, L'Atelier Parfum fragrances have achieved bright results. According to Mikola, in the past May, L'Atelier Parfum was ranked No. 2 in Sephora's fragrance category, and Coeur de Pétales (Heart of Petals) was nominated for Sephora's Best Fragrance category. "10 bottles of L'Atelier Parfum perfume are sold per day in Sephora Hong Kong."

It will enter Tmall Global this year

CHAILEEDO data showed that the Chinese fragrance market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.5% during 2021-2025, far exceeding the global fragrance market's CAGR of 7%. The size of the Chinese fragrance market is expected to reach 20.7 billion yuan in 2023. By 2025, the Chinese fragrance market is expected to reach 30 billion yuan in retail sales, and is expected to become the second-largest market in the world.

Despite the huge potential of the Chinese market, Chinese consumers' fragrance habits are different from those of European and American consumers, L'Atelier Parfum is also aware of this, Masha said, first, Chinese consumers and European and American consumers like different fragrance notes. For example, European consumers prefer cologne, and sweet sense, while Asian consumers prefer floral notes. Masha explained that L'Atelier Parfum's best-selling fragrance in Sephora in Hong Kong is Coeur de Pétales (Heart of Petals), the main note of which is floral.

Secondly, Chinese consumers' perfume habits are also different from those of European and American consumers. Masha said that the perfume penetration rate of Chinese consumers is only 6%, which is low compared with 50% of European and American consumers. However, Chinese consumers prefer more unique and niche scents in perfume selection, especially the younger generation of Chinese consumers, who want to express their own personality through perfume. L'Atelier Parfum fragrances are linked to different emotions of each individual with each fragrance. Therefore, Mikolaj feels that L'Atelier Parfum fragrances meet this demand of Chinese consumers.

Based on this trend, the Chinese market will be the focus of L'Atelier Parfum's efforts in the future. "We want China to be one of our key markets and its potential is absolutely huge. I think that L'Atelier Parfum has created a beautiful brand story and brand DNA, which is an important factor to make a fragrance brand in China." Mikolaj stated.

As a first step for the overseas brand to enter China, L'Atelier Parfum will open a store in Tmall Global in 2023 and enter the offline channel in mainland China in 2024. Mikolaj is very excited about coming face to face with Chinese consumers, the most sophisticated consumer group, "We are very excited about our upcoming arrival in China and we have been waiting for a long time for this project. Now, we think that we have momentum."

For the future development plan of the brand, Mikolaj said, "The brand image for each market still needs to be strengthened, and also needs to increase consumer awareness of the brand." It is understood that the two founders are currently preparing for a new collection of L'Atelier Parfum and are also planning to expand into new categories such as home fragrances. Notably, L'Atelier Parfum's first offline boutique will open in the heart of Paris. In the future, Mikolaj hopes to bring offline boutiques to Beijing and Shanghai in China.